sábado, 6 de septiembre de 2008

Its been a long time since I decided to stop writing in this blog, infelizmente....

I thought I would post my final reflection report, hope you enjoy.

Final Watson Reflectionby Marlon Bishop

Beyond being the world’s best independent research opportunity, the Watson Fellowship is a unique psychological experiment. Fifty intrepid souls get the unique chance to decontextualize themselves, to step outside of the environments and cultures that shape their every gesture and color their every perception. Cultural relativity rears its ugly head in just about every facet of our lives, and most people who spend anytime abroad talk about how much bigger their world becomes afterwards. They realize their way is but one way, that the world contains multitudes and that every certainty has its exception. But we Watsons live so many miniature lives in so many places, with so little routine or structure, that something else begins to happen. We become unstuck.

At first, the joy of Watson travel, especially in the so-called “third world,” is about the discomfort of it – as we are imposing our projects on the world we are accosted by difference, sounds and smells, mannerisms and mores. This can be both exhilarating and maddening. Every action, from buying toothpaste to securing an interview, is infinitely more challenging, every success more elating. The fruit being sold out of the donkey-pulled cart, the crowded and inane public transportation system, all of it is profoundly uncomfortable, and the adrenaline of negotiating and translating that discomfort burns a smile onto your face. But at some point in the year, I began to realize that what surprised me most was how incredibly comfortable I had become everywhere and at all times, the nonchalance with which I encountered the previously unimaginable. I was unstuck. I was everywhere and anything. I could be one moment riding in a pickup truck down a pothole-studded dirt road through a jungle-studded sky and the next interviewing a successful musician in a swanky urban hi-rise, and while it could still put a smile on my face, I was no longer surprised. Commuting on a canoe through the mangroves wasn’t some exotic novelty anymore, it just was what it was. Where once there was a catalog of possible occurrences, now anything was possible, and even probable. This is an sensation that I really wish everybody could have. It’s like being a superhero, like being water, omnipotent and formless. Unstuck in place, we roamed, and we flowed through the cracks in the wall as they spread out like spider webs.

The unsticking process was not at all easy. I don’t think I could have imagined how bad my first Watson weeks could have been. I was deeply unprepared in every sense for this trip, but I had already traveled in developing countries, had lived abroad, spoke the language well – I figured I would be fine. Yet I arrived in the Dominican Republic fearful and sad. Terrified. My tenuous contacts hadn’t gotten back to me in a while, and I didn’t really understand why I was leaving home, towards what ends I was thrusting myself into uncertainty. I pulled up to the pensíon that I reserved in the crumbling and gloomy Old City of Santo Domingo, fittingly the first city founded in the Americas, and stumbled my way into the unfriendly room in what I soon discovered was more or less a brothel. I talked to nobody for about a week, retreated into self-pity. I reread my ex-girlfriend’s goodbye letter every night and trembled. Every fruit laden donkey and pothole was threatening. I found myself in the neighborhood phone-center not because I needed to call anybody, but because I craved its cold institutional cleanliness. I couldn’t believe it, Marlon Bishop of all people found himself desiring the easy and familiar over aventure.

But then one night of week two I was aimlessly wandering through the gloom and stopped for a coffee at the ancient nameless café on my block, too atmospheric for its one good and perpetually filled with old men arguing about chess and politics and women. One drunk old bohemian – I still remember his name, Monchy, a long retired merengue singer from the good old days – began to talk to me. We talked for hours about music and every other thing, and at the end he wrote down the numbers of some musician friends on a crumpled yellow piece of paper. It was a first moment of endless connections, but more importantly, it was a sign that I could make this happen, a first step. At first I started interacting with old people and children – the former charmed by me and the latter curious. Then I began to work with branching out to everybody in-between. And a few weeks later I had negotiated the contract on an apartment, attended a syncretic pilgrimage, broken my life-long vegetarianism on a meal with a vodú “queen”, played the mandolin on a very large stage, and was at least knee-deep in the Dominican folklore scene. And it never ceased to amaze me, you inflict yourself on the world and it responds, you do something and then it happens, the realities gather like magnetic filings as intention is translated into action. It seems so basic, but wow oh wow.

The unsticking is fundamentally about adaptation. I’m always amazed by how adaptable human beings really are, how we can make anything our own in just a short time. On the Watson Fellowship, one adapts to constant change as the norm, and new stimuli become a part of everyday life. And so, a life so clearly extraordinary becomes mundane, and its hard to imagine any previous life, when things were so static. There is no other way, one begins to take it all for granted, ignores the jungle mountain view and focuses on the tiny tediums. But every now and then it would hit me like breaking news where I was and what I doing, like a revelation. I would survey the plummeting valley or the soaring skyline and shake my head in disbelief that this could really be my life. I would kiss the skies and thank the ground. Stepping outside of myself in those rare moments, it seemed madness that someone could be given such a gift. As exciting as that original traveler’s plunge may be, this new feeling, this becoming unstuck, is something far greater. Having shed my context, I can float freely between contexts and realize that apart from all of it, I am still profoundly me. It’s the sensation of wearing the whole world like a comfortable shirt. The sensation that I belong everywhere.

******

I spent my year studying the endless manifestations of African music in the Americas. I listened to the lost voices of a story that is often told in part, hoping to stitch together the missing strands of its narrative. It is a story that affects nearly every person in the world, every single day – almost all modern popular music carries the heritage of the musical syncretism that happened in the New World when diverse African and European peoples were forced to share the same soil. Everything from Bollywood film music to Japanese pop has a New World beat lurking somewhere. This is mostly due to the dissemination of American popular styles such as rock and roll by our massive culture industry in the 20th century, but there have been other pathways – Cuban rumbas are the root of modern African dance genres like the Congolese soukous, Jamaican-rooted ska is protest music of a generation of Spaniards, and Argentinean tangos gave birth to modern folk styles from Helsinki to Tokyo. What happened in New World was, in my opinion, the pivotal moment in the history of music. However, the story as normally told omits the great swath of forgotten Afro-American musics. Scattered across the continent are abandoned and isolated black enclaves who make deeply African music, music that has been barely recorded and disseminated internationally. There is so much to be heard. It is a story that is hard for the musicians themselves to tell, because it is a story of incredible pain. The music exists only because of what is perhaps mankind’s most awful sin – the African enslavement that upon which the wealth of modern Europe and America was built. The music is so often more than music – its religion and lament, rebellion and vindication as well. I spent the year chasing these lost sounds. I took lessons and interviews with gnarled masters and young academics; I attended barrio dance parties, countryside religious rituals, and city concert halls. I recorded everything that vibrated in rhythm. I traveled up and down rivers and coasts in remote regions searching for somebody who remembered the old ways. I found some traditions alive, vibrant and dynamic and others nearly lost, kept going by a few hardworking souls and bastardized on the stage by folkloric dance groups. I found people who took me in as a son and others who didn’t want to talk to me at all. I found richly recorded and documented styles such as bumba-meu-boi in Brazil’s Maranhão province and vast traditions never fixed on any medium such as the marimba dances of Ecuador’s Esmeraldas. Mandolin jury-rigged to my back, I played with everybody I possibly could.

While there are certainly a lot of people who know a whole lot more than me, there are probably few people who have witnessed first hand as many styles of Afro-Latino music as I have. In retrospect, my haphazard roadmap for a survey of Afro-Latino styles was actually pretty well designed. I went to one country in each major region of the Americas – the Caribbean, Central America, the Southern Cone, the Andes, the Pacific Coast, and the Atlantic Littoral. In each of these places, local contexts, histories, demographics, and geographies have shaped the rhythms, instruments, and thematic content of the musics, as well as the place in society that those musics hold today. The differences are great – Ecuadorian 6/8 curulaos played on untempered marimbas are a world apart from the Uruguayan candombe banged out by fifty drummers down Montevideo streets. Of course, there are intense areas of intersection. I’ve listened to a great deal of musical theories and formed many of my own, and here is not the place to really expound very deeply upon them, but I will try to give an overview of some elements present in the music.

I try to avoid the stereotype that the sole African contribution to syncretic music is rhythm, because African melodies, harmonic systems, and texts also have influenced New World music greatly. Yet there is no doubt that Africans brought a rich rhythmic understanding to the New World. Most Afro-Latino styles are steeped in polyrhythm, the layering of differently metered musics on top of each other. Musicians play in 3/4 and 4/4 and 6/8 all at once, and the artistry in the music becomes playing with these pluralities, musical games of mind-boggling complexity. Indeed, Afro-Latino music often surpasses African music in complexity because so many different African peoples intersected in the New World – Mande and Fula, Bantu and Wasalu all in the same place for the first time in history. The European influence is often almost non-perceptible, yet it is there – in the Spanish language, in the melody of a Catholic psalm. Most Afro-Latino music is also somehow related to a clave – a repeating musical pattern that sits behind everything, a world that fittingly means “key” in Spanish. The claves differ, but almost all are rooted in the Cuban habanera, a popular colonial dance style exported all over the continent in the 19th century. Indeed, three little notes kept cropping up all across the continent, the result of African 6/8 music forced into the square-like 4/4 of European dances, the squashing of African polyrhythmns into something the colonizers could understand. The same sounds could appear anywhere –the interlocking tambourines of the Dominican spiritual salve is sped up and beat warlike on Andean bass drums and becomes the Bolivian saya. Instrumentations change, tempos change, subtle accents change, and the music says something completely new.

One important difference between African-rooted music in the former English colonies and in the former Spanish colonies is that in the latter, enslaved Africans held on to their drums. The English, often said to have been much harsher taskmasters, understood the power and importance of the instruments and took them away, and so African music manifested itself on European snares and tom-toms. In Latino countries, however, drums are present in staggering numbers and varieties – the Dominican Republic alone has well over twenty classes of them, each with their own musics and mythologies. Across the continent, I heard echoes of the same strands of lost traditions in African drum making – how the tree must be felled on a new moon, the skins cured at dawn. This was the first time in my life that I spent a lot of time playing and thinking about drums, and I soon learned that there is so much more than the rhythms you can write down on paper, that their languages go far deeper than I thought. A drum hides hundreds of tones like syllables waiting to be coaxed from its skin, to be strung into words and sentences. A drum can tell stories. Everywhere I went, I met old toothless men without a drop of musical education whose hands intuitively played things the greatest jazz drummers never dreamed of, things miles away from the wildest avant-garde. In my interviews, I’d ask these men how they learned and they would always reply with the same mantra, “its in me, I carry this in the blood.” Looking at their 3 year olds barely speaking but already playing it seems like a true statement. But I don’t believe musical talent is genetic, rather, it is in the tradition - a deep relationship with body and time, an understanding of the richness within rhythm, cultivated over thousands of years and still maintained by communities 500 years removed from their ancestral homelands. In some places, drumming was the last surviving element from traditions that once included many kinds of instruments, and even the cynics boldly claim that the beat can never be lost. The colonizers tried to ban and burn them, but the drums survive. One close friend of mine in the Dominican Republic was brujo or spirit-medium named Giovanni, a man whose eyes seemed look into other worlds. He saved me on the night of my fundamental Watson trauma – an armed assault by 6 men. There I was: left penniless, hours from home in the slums in the infinite night of a Caribbean blackout, and he found me and got me home safely. Giovanni always wore a totem around his neck, a magical object that he claimed made him invisible to his enemies, that protected him from evil. That empowered him to help me on that very night. It was a small model drum, hanging close to his heart. Afro-Latino music always dwells very close to spirituality, and there is no greater example than the Dominican Republic, where complex drumming traditions act as the direct conduit to the gods in the omnipresent syncretic cult vodú. There I witnessed more crystallized versions of something I found all over the continent, the very thing that has attracted me to African and black music my entire life, to the cosmology of George Clinton and P-Funk – a spiritual concept that seeks personal transcendence through communities moving together in music. It is a mystical tradition that emphasized a physical, even musical, relationship with God. Even in countries where Afro-syncretic religion died out long ago, this idea is central, built into the music itself. Most Afro-rooted styles are based around a simple repeating pattern or chorus with improvised drumming and singing woven through. The same thing repeats again and again, and while the music doesn’t expressly change over time, something changes. The musicians play that one pattern more and more perfectly, they delve deeper into a single moment. They groove. And when done right and done together, the reduction of everything to this single thing brings us somewhere higher. All over from Honduras to Uruguay, musicians will play one two-beat rhythm for hours and hours. At Dominican devotional festivals, musicians play up to twenty hours straight, past where their hands become numb and raw; the audience sings and dances until sunrise. They are searching for being perfectly where they are, and when they hit it right, there is no doubt in the world that we can rise above. That we already are perfect.

When I decided to spend the year going deeply into the hidden regions of Afro-Latino music, I don’t think I understood what that meant completely. I grew up in the multiculturalism of public school New York and then marinated in the intense racial atmosphere at Wesleyan, where identity politics is serious business. I didn’t want this project to be about, race, it was about music, the great unifier. However, there was no avoiding the glaring questions. I spent my year in black communities in Latin America, without a doubt some of the most abandoned and poor places in the hemisphere. Racial realities are complex in Latin countries in part due to a history of racial mixture but also due to governments who have promoted color-blindness as a way to bind diverse societies under national banners, to stem the tension between the white elite and the vast dispossessed, indigenous, and black. In Bolivia, slavery effectively ended for the tiny black community in the lush Yungas coca fields with the passing of a land tenancy act fifty years ago. In the arid Chota valley of Ecuador, slavery effectively continues to this day. Laced into the narrative are stories of cimaronaje, blacks who escaped to isolated havens in the mountains or forest. For example, Ecuador’s Esmeraldas province, hidden in splendid isolation by inhospitable wetlands, served as a free black enclave for all its history. Everywhere there are remnants of African words that emerge in song, powerful uttering that have lost their original meaning. African-influenced cooking, dialect, religious practice, and craftwork survive as well. These are difficult places, and the struggle and pain of a vast history of mistreatment is reflected everywhere in the music. In Honduras, there is the parranda, the lilting Garifuna blues that tells of nostalgia for their flourishing home on Saint Vincent before the English expelled them to Central America in the 19th century. Then in Uruguay, in the historically black Barrio Palermo, a community remembers a more recent injustice, the senseless demolishing in 1970 of the Ansina tenement where the greatest candombe playing families lived side by side, now scattered rootless throughout the city. On Sunday nights when they get together to play and march sixty strong through the streets, they turn to the hulking ruins of their own ancestral home in salute. Although it looks like a mobile dance party, the candombe drummers call its guerra - war. It is a great seething cry of pain and joy and anger all at once, endlessly reverberating through the spooky grey quiet of the old city.

Racism is deeply imbedded in Latino society. Social discrimination is everywhere; economic and educational opportunities for blacks often virtually negligible. I was easily accepted into all the communities I worked with, and this was partially because so few outsiders had bothered to be interested in their music, but also, I suspect, because there is very little racial consciousness in these places. The extreme case is the Dominican Republic, with 95% of the population said to have African ancestry and where complex self-directed racial prejudice has led the darkest Dominicans to believe themselves the decedents of Taino indians and for skin-whitening creams to become the most commonly sold beauty products. However, in every country there are nascent black solidarity and black consciousness movements that have begun to make real strides, often inspired by U.S. heroes such as Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. Along the trip, I came to realize that as much as music means to me, the communities I worked with have much more in stake. For the small black enclaves across Latin America, the challenge to gain some kind of voice is seemingly insurmountable. Music is not only the binding glue of a community, not only a living link to that community’s history, but their greatest political asset, the most powerful way to gain desperately needed attention, funding, and respect from their societies at large. It is so deeply laced with importance.

I found some musical traditions that were teetering on the verge of extinction. In Honduras I traveled the fishing villages of the North Coast and the Mosquitia rainforest looking for the famous guitar-slinging Garifuna bluesmen and found nearly none. Cultural workers such as my host, Aurelio Martinez, world-class musician and national senator, could do nothing but watch a unique culture unravel and diffuse into the reggaeton-grinding Latino mainstream, watch as the youngest of generations chattered in Spanish instead of the Garifuna language during their beachside soccer matches. As the practice of living off American family remissions replaces subsistence fishing, the contexts change and the music must find a new space to survive or die off. Then in Ecuador I found one of the most bizarre musical morphologies of all. The banda mocha of the Chota valley is a traditional orchestra of instruments made out of vegetables. They transform squashes into tubas and trumpets; they play orange-tree leaves like virtuoso clarinetists. Whereas once, every town in the valley had a banda mocha, now there is only one scraggly group, most of its members well over eighty. In a few years, it may be gone forever. Elsewhere in Ecuador, the gorgeous ring of Esmeraldan marimbas struggles to be heard above the booming car stereos. The tradition lies on the backs on a handful of devoted men like Alberto Castillo, who continues to build marimbas even though he must sell them at a loss, who remembers not eating for days to save up for travel expenses to gigs that paid nothing. Men who sacrifice everything to keep the traditions from dying.

I found other musical cultures very much alive. In the Dominican Republic, a vast richness of Afro-Latino styles played every day in the fields of the poor and the basements of the rich, kept alive by a popular religion that manifests itself daily. In Uruguay, the black minority’s candombe has become music of Carnival and the symbol of a nation, played by the descendents of Germans and Italians as often as blacks. Afro-Andean bomba has become essential at any dance party in the Northern Ecuadorian Andes. The intersection of African rhythms and indigenous melodies has proved a winning pop combination for the Quichua-speaking peoples who live in the area. In remote Northern Brazil, the frenetic tambour de crioula drums sound nightly downtown as young Brazilians delve into a old tradition supported heavily by state-funded workshops. Even when it seemed a music style was dying, its traces would appear in other places – in the rhythm of the church bells, in a sauntering gait, as a sample embedded in the heart of a new hip-hop song.

I imagine most Watsons will say that the highlight of their trip was the people they met. Like others, I relied on the kindness of strangers, from people who would help a poor lost gringo find the correct bus to those who took me into their homes for weeks at a time. In order for my project to succeed, I relied on musicians to open up their world to me and teach me their secrets, to trust this wandering fair-haired stranger. I had the privilege to meet some of the largest personalities in Afro-Latino music, some of the most unforgettable characters to have walked this hemisphere. They often led very simple lives with little recognition from the world at large, but exuded a power, an easy confidence, a mystical knowledge of things. Pure undiluted gravitas. Among them is the recently deceased Sixto Minier, king of the congos spiritual brotherhood, an ancient man saddled with the responsibility of guarding and playing twenty-one sacred drum beats for the funerals of living saints, whose giant yellow-tooithed smile lit up the barrio. In Honduras I met Pancho, a legendary guitarist who still lived in a thatched, dirt-floored dwelling while his neighborhoods built concrete palaces, who could hollow out a drum trunk with a chisel in an afternoon and spend two nights at sea fishing in a canoe, whose gnarled voice sang like the mountains. In cosmopolitan Montevideo, I got to know Perico Gularte, king of the repique drum, whose battle scarred hands read like roadmaps of a life heating and beating drum skins on phantasmal Sunday evenings. In Ecuador I visited the riverside stilt village of Papa Roncón, the greatest marimba player to have ever lived, who lounged shirtless in his hammock and spun tales, recounting how the devil visited him and taught him the chords of a guitar, back in his youth when he worked canoeing goods up and down the emerald waterways, before the first roads came to the province and brought hopes and false promises. Endless more, people of unshakable vision. People who make everything one can ever become seem so small.

******

There is a tried and true truism that “music is a universal language” – and it really is true. Though I became very fluent in Spanish and Portuguese over the course of the year, my year was really made possible by the ephemeral connection that musicians around the world have There is a feeling that we share a vital experience, a certain something we carry inside us, something that ordinary people don’t perceive or understand. I’ve often thought that playing music taps you into a special nameless part of the universe, opens one up to another class of knowledge. Playing music with other people forms such strong bonds because it involves a form of communication in some ways deeper than the limiting symbols of speech, a language much more basic and primal. I think music made it easier for me to make lasting and meaningful bonds with locals of every class, race, and age than it was for some fellows – after all, most of my fieldwork sites were places where people drank whisky and danced. I fell easily into music circles everywhere I went, and the cultural currency one gets from being a musician overcomes the heavy prejudice against Americans, overcame differences in race and culture. Many of these friends will stay with me for life. My Afro-Dominican guru Jose Duluc, as wild a rockstar as Jim Morrison and as wise a revolutionary as Bob Marley, became a father to me in those emotional three months. The guys of Vieja Historia, the Uruguayan indie-bluegrass band with whom I toured around that little country. Along the trip, I came to realize that as much as music means to me, the communities I worked with have much more in stake. For the small black enclaves across Latin America, the challenges to overcome overt racism and gain some kind of voice are seemingly insurmountable. Music is not only binding glue of a community, not only a living link to that community’s history, but their greatest political asset, the most powerful way to gain desperately needed attention and respect from their societies at large. It is so deeply laced with importance.

Despite my ease of making connections with musicians, the Watson Fellowship is hugely about being alone, about being taken out of our hyper-socialized environments and endless tiers of personal responsibilities and seeing what happens to a person who spends the bulk of their time alone. On one side, the experience of solitude is loneliness, something every Watson fellow is familiar with. Cooking yourself rice and beans by candlelight in the thundering rain; riding past heartbreakingly beautiful mountains and having nobody next to you to rave about them to. On the other side, there is the joy of self-reliance, of being comfortable in your own head. I learned to cherish all that time spent thinking, nurturing an internal life that sometimes we are only aware of on the peripheries of consciousness, too distracted by relationships and activity to perceive. When all the alone time gets overbearing, I would let some of that Latino gregariousness take over and talk to anybody who would listen to me about anything. Old men and children were a safe bet.

I’ve now said that the Watson Fellowship is fundamentally about a lot of different things, but really, for me, it was fundamentally about freedom. Freedom from responsibility to one’s friends and families and lovers, freedom from one’s past, and freedom from one’s future. Freedom from one’s culture with its morals and mores, and freedom from your own preconceptions about the world and how it works. For me, language was an incredible variety of freedom – these beautiful Spanish words were not laden with a lifetime of mind numbing subtleties, not yet worn out or heavy in their myriad meanings. In Spanish, I could rediscover the act of expression with new words, say everything in the most honest way possible without self-consciousness. The obvious freedoms of being able to go where one pleases and when one pleases. For me, it was the freedom to fully be the person I’ve wanted to be, to be concerned only by how to best take advantage of that very freedom. The freedom to be so completely myself.

It shouldn’t surprise me that I adapted just as easily to being home as I did to being anywhere else this year. We humans are adaptable creatures, us Watsons evenmore so. The moment that I arrived home to that familiar block, the magnetic warmth of home competing internally with the desire to flee back into the great unknown, I knew how it would all instantly disappear dreamlike back into the comic-book fantasy it so often seemed. How soon I would wear my old ways comfortably. Yet a month later, I still feel sometimes this stasis of place and meaning is actually the lucid dream, that I will wake up and be out there somewhere, mandolin in hand and jeans rolled up to my ankles, sunshine in my eyes. I shouldn’t worry – everybody says that “the Watson stays with you forever” and I imagine that has to be true. It is jarring, though. All year long I spent building this formless something, a thing composed of all my successes and failures, project and personal. A symphony rising out of your own life and how you relearn to live it, motifs from the past, thematic innovation everywhere. Only to see it sort of shimmer and vanish like jungle air.

What I have is what I have learned, and I have learned so very much. Pictures and endless journal entries aimed towards freezing the present will inherently fail, those mechanical and psychological interpretations of objective realities. But knowledge is not meant to freeze time, but to guide the way we live our lives, to provide framework with which to interpret future realities. From the humblest communities I learned about what community actually meant, about resourcefulness, about dedication, and about how a good dance party does not require a big budget. I have learned about how to give from people who had nothing. I learned about joy, about how to scream out to the heavens that you are happy to be alive when it doesn’t look like there’s much to be happy about. I learned that my apathy was misguided, that we have an imperative not to live our lives in ways that hurt other either directly or indirectly. I learned that people can and will always surprise you. I learned how much we all dehumanize the dispossessed without even realizing it. I learned our beautiful America (we are, north and south, one America afterall), her every curve. I learned that I am proud of the United States and its mind-blowing dynamic cultural climate, and that I will stand up for that. I learned that I like to talk about serious things with strangers in foreign languages. I learned some practical skills, like how to negotiate loudly with landlords and taxi drivers, and how to cook many kinds of vegetables. I learned that no matter how-street-smart, a fresh-faced gringo can simply not wander into the slums at will. I learned about being alone, about loving quiet as well as the thundering music. I learned about something indescribable and unspeakable of great beauty, the meaty center of Afro-Latino music that has no name but sends shivers through one’s soul. I learned about how different people can be and how similar all of us are. I learned about darkness and silence and about not having electricity or water. I learned about thankfulness. I learned about yearning and about need. I learned so much more, unquantifiable lessons that I hope will continue to inform my existence and make me smile or cringe in random moments of repose. Most of all, however, I learned from the incredible musicians I worked with this year, people of such pure hearts, of such deep vision. Thank you, everybody, so much.

I have a ridiculous grant from the Watson Foundation to travel Latin America for a year, studying 5 distinct of underground styles of African-rooted music in DR, Honduras, Uruguay, Ecuador, and Brazil. And of course, wilding out to the greatest degree conceivable. Herein you can read up on adventures, thoughts, rants, diatribes, emotional outpourings, pictures, music.